A significant danger of indoor cooking is air pollution by toxic emissions from fuel combustion. If not vented properly, harmful emissions can cause death in a closed environment. According to World Health Organization's report in 2014, harmful emissions from indoor cooking are responsible for 4 million death each year.
Some existing stoves may have a safe venting mechanism only while a pot is placed on stovetop. For example, sunken pot stoves, where harmful gas exhaust passing through gaps between a pot bottom and a stovetop is drafted into a gas outlet before it is safely released. However, sunken pot stoves do not have the ability to effectively prevent harmful exhaust gas from being released once a pot is removed, unless an open stovetop is manually closed or the cooking fire is put out.
Existing stoves purely rely on human actions to close a stovetop or to put out cooking fire in order to ensure safe emission of fumes when a cooking container is removed from a stovetop. However, it is impractical and inefficient to put out a fire and to start a new fire between each cooking. Additionally, people often forget to close a stovetop in between cooking sessions. In developing countries where people usually reside in a relatively small, crowded and closed environment without proper venting outlets, death can easily occur when a cook forgets to close an open stovetop between cooking sessions after a cooking container has been removed.
It is desirable to have a stove that has a mechanism to correlate the placement and removal of a cooking container on a stovetop with the proper venting outlets, such that toxic gas from fuel burning can be prevented from being released into an indoor area inadvertently. Such a mechanism will save lives.